We performed a comparison between VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) and VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: vROps is the winner in this comparison. It is simple to set up, efficient, easy to manage, and provides its users with valuable and accurate information.
"vRealize automation stability is pretty good. They are always fixing bugs. The product team is doing a great job of addressing any issues that we might have."
"The most valuable feature is being able to deploy a virtual machine from a low level. We can automate everything including network configuration, firewall configuration, storage, storage attachment, OS deployment, middleware, and so forth."
"Our time to deliver a fully unified three-tier app, at the right version, is one-twentieth what it was before. There is no manual intervention. No IP management. It just dramatically simplifies all of our processes."
"It's quite user friendly. Everyone can use it, even non-technical people. This is good, since we use it to build a self-service portal which even users with not a lot of technical background can use."
"Even with the virtualization, it would take us at least three or four days to create a VM. With vRA we have brought that down to seven minutes. The solution has helped increase infrastructure, agility, speed of provisioning, time to market, application agility. Everything got super fast."
"It is probably 90 percent quicker to get something out the door than it was before. For developers, depending on who is building VMs for them, sometimes they request anywhere from 20 to 100. Now, we can deploy them in a matter of an hour, where previously it might have taken me three days to deploy out 100 VMs."
"Aria Automation gives you the flexibility to deploy tenants with customized blueprints for permissions and policies. Version 7.8 consisted of multiple products, so you had to deploy a lot of virtual machines on one of the servers. Starting from 8.6, VMware consolidated all the components into one Linux appliance. This allows the option to use vRA or DevOps capabilities."
"We automated many tool deployments with the help of the product, cutting short manual deployments and eliminating the need for human interaction. Its most valuable features include integrating various tools and working with different products using plugins."
"The automation brings insight into how we will grow. I can look at it, then make my recommendations on what equipment we need to do for the next fiscal year."
"The one that comes to mind is the ability for us to see how our VDI environment."
"I rated this solution an eight because it's intuitive and easy to use. The features that it'll bring us are tremendous"
"Instead of having a lot of people spend time doing manual tasks, it allows us to have dashboards and instantly show us any issues that we have, rather than trolling through log files."
"The most valuable feature is it's pre-warning. We get to know ahead of time when systems are starting to have problems. We can pay attention to the alerts and know right away that there's an issue developing at some point. We also use it to monitor poorly configured VMs: over-configured, under-configured."
"The tool helped the organization in all monitoring tasks when being delivered as a service for customers helps them to generate early alarm templates, being a cloud service provider is delivered as part of the IaaS to generate memory consumptions processing and storage additionally can be configured parameters such as networking and services that are configured on virtual machines."
"The most valuable feature is the insight into real-time performance."
"The performance for monitoring the VM is very good. Additionally, the solution is flexible."
"They should make it a little bit more dynamic, a little bit easier to deal with large-scale AD deployments. They need to make it a little more enterprise-ready. That is the one thing that kills us."
"We upgraded twice. The last upgrade was a bit problematic."
"I would also like to see them streamline the install. It's split between Windows and Linux appliances, and it would be easier if it was all appliances. I think they're going that way."
"It's not a smooth upgrade process. For a DTA environment, which is very simple, it is a smooth process, but for our production environment, which is quite enhanced and has a lot of dependencies, it's not easy at all, and it results in a lot of errors... It takes a lot of retries to upgrade which ends up being costly."
"vRO can get out of sync with vRA. We've run into every once in a while."
"I would like to see better integration capabilities. Maybe if they could develop libraries within Aria Automation for simpler integration with other third-party solutions, instead of just basic integration."
"They could extend the ability to use vRealize Orchestrator Automation for organizations with multiple tenants. It should be easier to operate and extend different capabilities from vRealize Orchestrator. Currently, it's difficult to build advanced services in Aria Automation because you need to use the vRealize Orchestrator."
"7.5 is not user-friendly, in fact, it's a nightmare. They changed everything on the graphic user interface, the mode where the user interacts with the product."
"In the past, when we have raised priority one tickets and they have sent us level one engineers. This wasted time because the L1 was only able to perform the troubleshooting steps that we had already completed."
"It would break, and you would have to go fix it. Then it would break, and they would have some other guys that knew a bit more about it, and they fixed it."
"Some of the more advanced stuff takes a bit of time to dig into it. It takes a little longer to setup if you want really detailed stuff. They could make the learning curve smoother."
"It is a bit complex, so you need to spend time with it."
"We are looking to optimize all the parts. For example, vCenter can be fully deployed automatically, which is not the case with vROps. We can click some next buttons to integrate vCenter and would like these type of features for vROps, if possible."
"Moving forward, I would like to see some tighter integration with the vSphere Web Client, just so that I don't have to open multiple windows and jump back and forth. We've currently running vSphere 6.7 and there is a lot tighter integration between vROps and vSphere, but it can always be better."
"One thing I mentioned when speaking with the engineers is that we'd like to get more granular reporting. We'd like to see more real-time reporting on the application-process level. Right now, we don't get that. For example, if I have a VM that's spiking up on memory or CPU, I can't really drill down to the application level and say, "Hey, I have IE that's spiking due to the user's streaming of video and that's affecting their entire session." vROps doesn't do that."
"In a previous version, you could click on a cluster to see a lot of information about efficiency, e.g., when you will run out of memory, CPU usage, and RAM in percentages. In newer versions, you see this information in megahertz and kilobytes, not percentage. I don't like this change so much. If you need to present information to your boss or Director of IT, the information would be better with a percentage. Now, you have only a big number and don't know the percentage of use that you are getting from the VMs. I don't know why they changed it, but I liked the percentage version more than getting the numbers for megahertz of memory. Also, kilobytes of memory is a very large number. For a simple view, gigabytes or terabytes is better."
VMware Aria Automation is ranked 1st in Cloud Management with 133 reviews while VMware Aria Operations is ranked 2nd in Cloud Management with 360 reviews. VMware Aria Automation is rated 8.0, while VMware Aria Operations is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of VMware Aria Automation writes "Allows for a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment to suit our customers". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware Aria Operations writes "It has good stability, but the report-generating feature needs improvement". VMware Aria Automation is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, vCloud Director, Morpheus, vCenter Orchestrator and Red Hat OpenShift, whereas VMware Aria Operations is most compared with VMware vSphere, IBM Turbonomic, Nutanix Prism, Veeam ONE and SolarWinds Virtualization Manager. See our VMware Aria Automation vs. VMware Aria Operations report.
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